Having spent a lot of my youth exploring different music, I have always had a soft spot for the Cajuns. The music of the swamps of Louisiana, USA has always seemed evocative of good times, good food and copious quantities of Bourbon. Check out the music of Balfa Toujours, Jo-El Sonnier, Beausoleil or Canray Fontenot – if you can find it – it’s well worth a listen.
Who are the “Cajuns”? Put simply, they appeared in Louisiana – the Cajun heartland – from Canada. Canada was the original home of the Acadians, inhabitants of the region known in the mid-16th century as Acadia. This area encompassed the traditional maritime provinces – what we now know as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. The name Acadia has two possible sources attributed to it. The first school of thought is that it was named after the region in in ancient Greece – Arcadia – an area famed for its peace and rural living. The other suggestion is that it is a corruption of a Native American word meaning “paradise” (Akade). To cut a fairly complex history short, the fighting between the British and the French in Acadia caused the British to finally expel the Acadians from their homeland, a move known as Le Grand Dérangement, in the 1750s. Many of the Acadians fled to Louisiana (possibly as there was already a group of French-speaking peoples there, the Creoles) and settled there alongside the local Native Americans.
The word Cajun itself is a further corruption of Acadian -pronounced loosely ka-zhun or kay-junn – and historians have noted that it was originally intended to be insulting. The word was reclaimed by the Cajuns as a “pride” word, much as the term “queer” has had the power taken out of it by homosexuals adopting it as their own.
Because the French spoken in Cajun country has been largely unchanged in hundreds of years (except, of course, for the influence of the Creoles) it is quite different in many ways to the French spoken in mainland Europe. For example, “essence” in European French means “petrol”. Cajuns fill their cars with “de la gasoline” – and essence in Cajun means perfume. If you want to order shrimp in Louisiana, be sure to ask for “chevrettes”, not “crevettes”. Also tricky could be calling someone a “catin”. In European French, it is an insulting term for a woman (harlot, trollope, etc.) but in cajun, it simply means “doll”. To call a Cajun girl “ma catin” could reap huge benefits. Just don’t try it in Paris…
I hope I have done some justice to the Cajun people and their history. I have neither the time nor the space to fully cover the history of their migration and their rich cultural history, so I suggest you click here to access the rather excellent Cajun Culture site, which will give you a lot more information. Those French speakers among you may like to take a look here at the Louisiana State University’s pages on Cajun French.
Until tomorrow, then – Laissez les bons temps rouler!
